the YALE LOGOS
an undergraduate journal of Christian thought.
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Terror at the Cross, Transformed
April 15, 2022 | By Jadan Anderson MC’22
On that Friday, we looked at Jesus on the cross and were appalled. From what did we avert our eyes?
With guilty relief and a strange sense of injustice, we try to grasp how in God’s just world this perfect Man would die our deaths. How could we look? How could we look away?
Love and the Falling Fifth
March 7, 2022 | By Daniel Yen TD ‘22
While the sighs in Schumann’s music help us to understand what human love feels like, I believe the gospel accounts of Jesus’s crucifixion suggest that the experience of exhalation also helps us to better appreciate the love of God.
Meditations on the Fourth Word from the Cross
March 6, 2022 | By Elizabeth Propst H’23
When I close my eyes to pray, I find myself standing alone in the desert outside of Jerusalem. I am looking up at Christ’s body on the Cross. It is dark; the air is still and hot, and the world is silent except for Christ’s agonized, labored breath.
Ash Wednesday: Confrontation with Mortality
Feb 17, 2021 | By Will Willimon, Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry at Duke Divinity.
“The truth about life is that we shall die,” said writer Philip Roth, just before he died. Death is as out of control as life can get. In my years of pastoral work, I have served as psychopompos helping some five hundred souls to the grave, privileged to say a few words on God's behalf at their end.
Hope and Horror in the Cross
Jan 25, 2016 | By Tori Campbell MC '16
As a child, I grew up both terrified and fascinated by the sculpture of a dying man that hung on the wall of my grandmother’s church. As the priest evenly intoned through the mass, my gaze would slide up to the statue, darting back down when I saw the nails in the statue’s wrists. A few moments later, my eyes would inch their way up again. Invariably, I would end up having nightmares that night, related to the wrongly-accused Jesus hanging on the cross. After a few years, this image of the cross became somewhat sanitized in my mind; it gained the somewhat more dignified title of “crucifix.” Overall, the genre of statue seemed more artistic, somehow more tragically romantic, than frightening. There may, however, be some wisdom in my childhood fear. In fact, the biblical account of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ actually has more in common with a horror movie than a romance. That said, in the midst of the cross’ darkness, God’s justice and love for humanity becomes clearer than ever before, and the object of horror becomes a beacon of hope.
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